An Excel worksheet containing outline data. You can see how the “Level” column in Excel column 1 is in columns A and B rather than column C or D with the example below. ‹ ‹ ← This is a test ‹ ← Copy and paste a copy of the same text to your test sheet from MS Word and have the different highlighted column numbers show in the same column on your Excel sheet. The example is a copy of page 4 from A. ‹ ‹ ← This is the copy of the test sheet which has the level of the outline with highlighting of different sections in Excel. You can see the outline name and the “A” section is highlighted in red. ‹ ‹ ← You can easily delete the sheet you made as a test. You can always open it and edit it if you want to use the copy. ‹ ‹ ← And there you go! This is how it works. It works best in Word 2010, 2013, 2010, and 2013. As the original document is formatted for Word 2007, the text is displayed in Excel format for other versions as well. Example of the Word documents you can use to convert In the following Excel worksheets are included to help illustrate this concept: Example of text formatting in Word for converting an outline As you can see, the font size, font, and line spacing are all in columns. In Excel, we could adjust the font for the individual cells, but in Word we have to convert the whole sheet to Excel format in order for this approach to work. Example of Word text formatting As you can see in this example, the line spacing is also in columns. Because Word uses a left aligned font, you cannot change individual lines, just how much and in what direction each line is aligned with the text. Example of Word spreadsheet As you can see, Excel uses boldface. In general, I find boldface easier to edit than italicized font because even if you can see where boldface is used, you can't see the exact font used. Summary The idea of this blog is to provide resources that demonstrate many of the things that Excel (and therefore Office) can be used for and which can be easier explained with example.